


Suttee

by Jintian



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-02-27
Updated: 2001-02-27
Packaged: 2017-10-29 20:25:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/323840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jintian/pseuds/Jintian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ascending stage of a cycle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Suttee

**Author's Note:**

> For sophiahelix, who knows when it's better to laugh.

  
She likes to take it from behind, arching her ass out so the round buttocks gleam with the light from his bedroom window. She always moans at his first push into her. He has to clutch her hips for balance while she grasps the headboard, his fingers grazing the curve of her belly while his penis strains for release. She's always so tight, gripping the aching length of him like a hot wet fist.

Usually her own hand will be between her legs, working at her clit while he locks his eyes on the empty infinity of the snake decorating her skin. Somehow she has the strength to maintain the position. It always gives his blood a jumpstart, makes him thrust harder, makes him think that maybe just this once, he can be the one to make her climax.

He doesn't know what she imagines as she brings herself to orgasm. Or rather, he could guess, if he were willing to think about it.

Sometimes, not quite resentfully, he'll picture the two of them in the basement office. He'll picture her naked and braced against the desk, flawless skin hidden from the fluorescents by his own body draped over hers. Or he'll picture her splayed out on its cool surface, breasts thrust up toward the ceiling and her smooth abdomen tightening as he buries his head between her thighs.

Sometimes he'll think about the one time they did it facing each other. The first time. How DC was suffocating with the end of summer, how she had removed his clothes in the chill air conditioning of his house. Pressed his shoulders into the cool sheets and ridden him until he cried out and felt her heat searing a brand into his skin.

Even then, he wondered what the hell he was doing. He knew it could never end well.

*

On car rides when they have cases, she always pretends to be absorbed by the scenery outside her window. At those times the silence between them lies thick, like a dead thing refusing to be bothered. But this is just something that has to exist, he knows, something they don't acknowledge. A corpse stumbled over in a pitch-dark room.

There was an ancient custom in India, called a suttee. If a husband died, his wife was to throw herself on his funeral pyre, to burn along with the body of her beloved. It was thought that once he was gone, her purpose for living was gone, as well.

Does she realize, he wonders, that she's enacting her own version of that everyday?

*

They're keeping secrets from him. He watches Skinner with careful eyes, how the other man leans toward her when they talk and the way he tracks her movements from behind those steel-rimmed glasses. On his off-days he even entertains the suspicion that maybe the two of them --

No. Skinner is a little too intimidated by her, he thinks. Or maybe he's just too smart. Too smart to try and resurrect a dying woman.

But maybe not smart enough to suspect anyone else might try.

*

Monday morning. The sun has lit the road on fire and he has the truck windows open. The air rushes in cold and biting, still in the grip of winter. The snow has long since melted but the memory of it remains.

It's a new week, he tells himself, trying to move into the ascending stage of a cycle. He's been at the bottom of it all weekend, slouching around his empty house waiting for her to call.

He's not in love, certainly. He has been before, and knows the difference. But what amazes him is how sex can still wrap a man's head up with his dick, even after all the things he's lived through.

Of course she's not in the office when he gets there. She follows her own hours, and they don't coincide with his unless she needs him to do something for her.

Lately that something has really only been one thing.

*

After lunchtime he comes back to the office and there she is, seated behind the desk, the desk with Mulder's nameplate centered at the front. She's flipping through a file folder, her hair brilliant red against the stark black and white of her clothes.

He closes the door behind him and she looks up. "Agent Doggett." That dry, matter-of-fact voice, as if for the past four weekends she hasn't been letting him fuck her until he can't see straight. It rakes fingernails down the blackboard of his nerves.

"Agent Scully," he says. "Nice to see you at work so early on a Monday."

She drops the folder on the desk with a flat, angry slap. He controls a jerk at the sound, bracing himself as her eyes turn scalpel-like. "Excuse me?"

He could pursue it, but he'd really only made the jab in reaction to her. It grates on him that she unbalances him like this, that she can make him say things with just the sound of her voice. He sighs. "I apologize. Forget I said anything. Bad weekend."

But that, of course, makes him think about the long, silent hours he slept alone, surrounded by the smell of her on his sheets.

She's still glaring at him. "Do you have something to say to me, Agent Doggett?"

And that second use of his name, still expressionless and unheated despite the fire in her eyes, makes him think about how she never calls him anything else. Not even when they're in bed and he's got his hips churning into her while she gasps and moans toward orgasm, when she doesn't call him anything at all.

He takes a breath through his nostrils, lets it out slow and easy. "No," he tells her. "I don't."

She stares into his eyes for another beat, and he almost believes she'll pick up the gauntlet again. But of course, she's no stranger to guilt. Even if she acts like it in the secret hours of night.

"Then let's get to work," she finally says, and drops her gaze.

*

Saturday night. He almost stumbles setting his baggage down, he's so tired. He drops his keys on the foyer table and heads straight for the fridge without bothering to turn the lights on. The smell of sour milk hits him as soon as he opens the door. "Shit."

Her case, her goddamned case, fucking morons in Minnesota thinking they'd been taken up to some mothership for the extraterrestrial version of a hoe-down. Five days of interviewing people, nearly all of whom had the disturbing tendency to rip off their clothes and point to goddamn appendix scars, birthmarks, and moles as if they were actual honest-to-Christ alien fingerprints.

He grabs the milk with a savage movement and upends it into the sink, tosses the empty carton into the wastebasket. Snags a Red Hook.

It's cold going down, thick and bitter, and his throat tightens at the initial taste of it. He swallows half the bottle in a couple of gulps, sucking in breath when he finally lowers it from his mouth. The kitchen smells like beer and sour milk now. He heads for the living room and collapses onto the couch, setting the bottle down on the coffee table.

Fuck the water rings, he mumbles to himself.

When he opens his eyes again, the moonlight from outside has shifted considerably. There's a sound echoing in his head, familiar. He sits up straight, searching the shadows and corners.

The doorbell rings, and he realizes that was what he heard, and what woke him. His eye catches the digital clock on his VCR, and he realizes further that it could be only one person.

He stands in his front doorway, letting her eye him up and down from the other side of the threshold. He has to suppress a shiver at the coolness of her gaze, but maybe it's just the winter chill.

"You still have your suit on," she says, brow raised.

"Too tired to take it off."

She just looks at him, and finally he pinches the bridge of his nose and moves aside so she can come in.

Under her dark coat she's wearing jeans and a sweater, definitely not lover-like garb, for all the tightness of her clothes. He watches her circle his living room, touching a finger to his beer bottle, running a hand along the top of his couch. Casual, unstudied movements, despite the sensual swaying of her hips.

A slow burn of resentment begins deep in his throat.

Finally she comes back around to stand in front of him. Reaches up to the knot of his tie.

He catches her wrist. "What are you doin'?"

Her eyes are shadowed. He can hear her breathing, sharp and shallow. "Don't tell me you're too tired."

"And what if I did?"

"I wouldn't believe you."

He drops her wrist like it's a live wire, and in fact it is, her whole body is, pressed up against him and setting off sparks he thinks he can almost _see_ in the darkness. Her hands fly along the buttons of his shirt, push the suit jacket off his shoulders, slip down to tease his cock awake.

"Fuck," he mutters, feeling his blood stir.

"Yes," she says, and guides his own hands under her sweater.

*

Eventually they're on the couch. She's stretched out beneath him, nipples pressed into his naked chest as he gnaws at the fragrant skin of her neck. His fingers slip through the wetness at the juncture of her legs, finding the tight bud of her clit and flicking it lightly. She arches her back, sighing.

He slides off the couch, kneeling on the floor and dragging her hips to the edge of the cushions. He lets his mouth linger for a moment at the peak of her breast, then traces a path with his tongue down the curve of her ribcage.

He nudges her legs apart again. Moves them so they rest on his shoulders and bends forward, fastening his lips where she is hot and throbbing.

"Ah," she moans. "Ah, God."

There's a tang to her, and a bitterness beneath that. It's a taste he knows will always reside in a corner of his memory, no matter what might happen to them in the future. He laps at her hungrily, wanting more and wanting to give her what she'll never ask for.

Her thighs begin to shake and she pulls back, lifting her legs away and causing his hand to slide down her stomach. "Let me..." he mutters.

But she's already on the floor, turning to brace herself against the couch with her back to him. The moonlight spills over her body, making the serpent stand out in silver and blue. He can still taste her on his lips, and it seems like his entire being is aching for the ecstasy he could have with as much effort as it would take to slip inside her.

And yet he pauses first, studying the sight. She's positioned like some obscene grotesque of a woman in prayer, legs spread and shoulders hunched over clasped hands, head down and face obscured by her hair.

That burn in his throat is back, tightening the air passages to his lungs. He feels dizzy. Dizzy with lust and a sudden, overpowering anger.

"I won't do it like that."

The words fall like a shattering vase. She swings around to look at him, her entire profile gone stiff. "What did you say?"

"Not anymore. Not like that."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about _this_." He stands up, feeling his knee joints crack. He's too old for this shit, too old for head games and emotional bruises.

She stands also, and it strikes him how much smaller she looks without the armor of her clothes. "You want it to end?"

"End? What's there to end? You coming over every weekend when you want someone to fuck?"

"If you're not satisfied with the way things are --"

"And you are?" He moves closer to her and she backs away a step. "Don't tell me _you're_ satisfied. You want someone else doing these things to you. I'm just the substitute."

"Don't tell me you're just realizing that now," she hisses. "We both went into this knowing what it was about."

"Yeah, I guess I did," he says tightly. "And now it's over."

She's collecting her clothes now, bending down and searching for them on the floor, clutching a shoe and a pair of jeans to her chest. He stands there watching her, the fury suddenly draining out of him. She's so small, dammit. So fucking small.

He puts a hand on her elbow, catching it in a loose hold before she can jerk away. "I'm sorry. Look, I'm sorry I said these things."

"I'm fine, Agent Doggett." Cold, monotone.

That makes him wince. "No, you're not. You're hurting. You've been hurting. It's just that...this was never the way to deal with it."

"What the hell do you know about it?" she hurls at him.

"I know plenty," he says quietly. "Maybe I'm most sorry I let you do this to yourself."

"I knew exactly what I was doing."

"Then that's even worse, isn't it?"

She dresses without answering him, covering up her skin and gathering her coat. But even with that armor reassembled, even though he's still naked and half-erect, she's the one in retreat.

She takes a breath, looking at a spot just to the right of his head. "On Monday, I'm going to ask to have you reassigned, Agent."

Truthfully, he was expecting that. But it still claws at him. And her voice, that goddamn voice ironed out so cleanly like the past hour hadn't even happened. She's a professional when it comes to rewriting.

And she can still make him say things.

"I guess it's just closed season on Mulder when you're at my place, _Agent_."

He watches her shoulders jerk. Opens his mouth to say anything, to swallow it all and somehow get her back on the couch again, back where he can try to resurrect her with his hands and his lips.

But instead, he stays silent while she pivots on her heel and yanks the door open, disappearing into the night.

And he realizes he was right about her taste. It's lingering on his tongue. Bitter, dry, and wintry, like a mouthful of ash.

  


**Author's Note:**

> Much appreciation goes to Diana Battis for her usual wise (and wise-cracking) beta, and to Mish, LizardChyck and Kest for the good cheer.


End file.
